1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to content distribution by publishers or end-users to service providers and, more particularly, to automated content distribution to multiple service providers through a single user interface.
2. Background of the Disclosure
Publishers, such as, bloggers, writers, website owners and developers, business owners, or other creators or distributors of content are constantly looking for ways to increase traffic to their content and drive more users to purchase or consume their products or services. Such content may be hosted on the publisher's website, for example, and may include a piece of information such as a URL, notes, status update, blog post, article, document, image, video, or other media. It is well known and documented extensively that backlinks, e.g., hyperlinks or referrals to the publisher's content, are the root driver for the amount of traffic directed to a website and are crucial for optimal search engine placement and click-through to the website. For this reason, publishers trying to drive traffic to their websites spend a great deal of time distributing the content using a manual re-keying process to submit content to each of a plurality of target services or service providers, e.g., social or business networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., bookmark aggregation services such as Del.icio.us, email providers, instant message services, blogs, websites, and other community or information portals where publishers submit content. This manual re-keying process is time consuming, costly, and inefficient.
Another well-known method to increase traffic and backlinks to a website is to provide website visitors the ability to bookmark and share the content with their friends and co-workers. This method of bookmarking and sharing typically involves providing a hyperlink to an end-user that they may email or bookmark to a single service, e.g., a social network or email address. Publishers can build their own website button or tool to provide their end-users with this bookmarking and sharing feature. However, as with the submission of content by a publisher to multiple service providers, prior bookmarking and sharing buttons or tools only allow a user to submit content to a single service at a time and require the user to manually re-key the content submission for each of a plurality of target services.